A federal judge has ordered the city to hand over the operations of its troubled jails on Rikers Island to an outside manager.

In a decision Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Laura Taylor Swain wrote that manager will "support remediation of the ongoing violations of the constitutional rights of people in custody in the New York City jails."

The manager, known as a "Nunez Remediation Manager," will also have the power to "control, oversee, supervise, and direct all administrative, personnel, financial, accounting, contracting, legal, and other operational functions of the [city Department of Correction] to the extent necessary to achieve compliance with the Contempt Provisions," according to the decision.

The ruling follows years of back and forth as conditions on the island worsened.

This past November, Swain found the city in contempt for failing to stanch violence and brutality at its jails.

In a written decision at the time, Swain said the city had placed incarcerated people in "unconstitutional danger" by failing to comply with 18 separate provisions of court orders pertaining to security, staffing, supervision, use of force and the safety of young detainees.

Her ruling stemmed from litigation that started more than a decade ago with allegations by the Legal Aid Society and others that the DOC had engaged in a pattern of excessive and unnecessary force on Rikers.

In a statement, Benny Boscio, president of Correction Officers’ Benevolent Association, said the union is willing to work with the outside manager, but added that they will maintain their “fierce advocacy for the preservation of our members’ employment rights and improving their working conditions.”

“No other workforce in this city has had to endure the unprecedented challenges that we have faced in the last five years, from significant staffing shortages, resulting in a reduction of nearly 40% of our workforce to increased assaults, including sexual assaults against our members,” he wrote. “The city’s jails cannot operate without us and no matter what the new management of our jails looks like, the path towards a safer jail system begins with supporting the essential men and women who help run the jails every day.”

In a statement, the Legal Aid Society called Tuesday's decision "historic."

"For years, the New York City Department of Correction has failed to follow federal court orders to enact meaningful reforms, allowing violence, disorder, and systemic dysfunction to persist in the jails," the statement said, in part. "This appointment marks a critical turning point — an overdue acknowledgment that City leadership has proven unable to protect the safety and constitutional rights of incarcerated individuals."

At a press conference Tuesday, Mayor Eric Adams said the city would "follow the rules to improve the conditions of Rikers," but added that the "problems on Rikers are decades in the making."

"How much oversight are you going to do before you realize that there's some systemic problems that we have turned around?" Adams said. "So, if the federal judge made the determination that they want to do something else, and they don't like what we're doing, it's a federal judge. We're going to follow the rules."

A law that mandates the closure of Rikers by August 2027 barred the city from making capital improvements at the jail complex, Adams said.

"We can't spend money on Rikers Island to improve the conditions, because it takes capital funding, and capital funding must go through a certain number of years," he said.

"What I'm hoping that with this announcement, that the federal judge would look at some of these laws, the laws that state that we can't handcuff dangerous inmates when we're transporting them," he added. "I'm hoping she looks at the funding plan that we have, free us up, that we should be able to spend capital dollars to improve the facility."

The parties in the case have an Aug. 29 deadline to come up with as many as four recommendations for who the outside manager should be.